Main menu

In a time when the world has tilted, when we are all worried about loved ones, small things can help…planting seeds in cups on a window sill in readiness for a garden, listening to music, reading a poem, meditating, or doing yoga.

Lately, I re-discovered drawing. Some of these little drawings are of ordinary objects I’ve collected: feathers, shells, spruce cones, and a few others are sketches made from photographs. I asked friends to send some photographs and they did. Often these drawings didn’t work. I’d get stuck trying to do something over and over again. I crumpled them up and kept going. The idea was simply to focus, to meditate on what I was doing.

One afternoon, I pulled out a book I loved when I was younger – The Zen of Seeing: Seeing/Drawing as Meditation – by Frederick Franck (Vintage, 1973). Franck describes the method he used in an outdoor workshop, after distributing cheap sketchbooks and pencils to his participants. They were asked to find a place by themselves, leaving six feet of distance between one another, and then he asked them to open their eyes, letting them fall on whatever plant, tree, or patch of grass was in front of them. Next, they were asked to close their eyes for five minutes. After that time, he asked them to open their eyes, giving an instruction: “Focus on whatever you observed before – that plant or leaf or dandelion. Look it in the eye, until you feel it looking back at you. Feel that you are alone with it… You are no longer looking, you are SEEING.”

Drawing as meditation… It doesn’t matter if the drawing works or doesn’t work: what matters is just attempting it. A line can lead to another line, and occasionally, there is a sense of resting with the mind alert. What I noticed was that I forgot about the news, and began to feel a sense of equanimity, of calm.

Try it with a leaf or a shell or a feather. All that’s needed is paper and pencil. As Frederick Franck says, let yourself truly see the object in front of you “until you feel it looking back at you.”

Share this:

A’isha Nasir is a Nigerian teenager who has been charged with adultery and sentenced to death. Sophie MacNeil is an ambitious young Canadian journalist who meets A’isha and writes an impassioned article about her plight. But when the article sets off waves of outrage and violence, Sophie is forced to come to terms with the naivete with which she approached the story. Who can – and should – tell a story? What happens when one speaks on behalf of another?

Speechless is a stunning novel of justice, witness, and courage. In luminous prose, Anne Simpson explores the power of words, our responsibility for them, and the ways they affect others in matters of life and death.

“Passionate and ambitious . . . Simpson introduces us to a cast of fully realized characters and spins a fast-paced and gripping narrative. What does it mean to speak for yourself, or for others?”

– Johanna Skibsrud, author of The Sentimentalists

“[F]iery, poetic, and at times devastating . . . An excoriating and beautiful read with the urgency of right here, right now.”

– Carol Bruneau, author of A Circle on the Surface

“Simpson deftly navigates the chaos that erupts at the outset of this sublime novel, guiding us through the vividly imagistic and intertwined desires of all her characters as their stories unfold in this deeply moving whirlwind of a read.”

– Elizabeth Philips, author of The Afterlife of Birds

“A global narrative about gender and race, about words and actions and reactions, this novel is bursting with tough female characters who will not back down and instead stand together against injustice. Simpson is a beautiful writer and this is a bold, brave book.”

– Alexander Macleod, author of Light Lifting

Share this:

“All of us are many selves within our lifetimes, one that is thrust upon us at birth, shaped during youth, and reconstructed throughout our lives. Who is this self? Who is this self in relation to others? In the coming-to-be of childhood or In the midst of illness, we face an unknown self within the one that is known. Even after death, we appear as fluid as water in the memories of those who knew us best. Strange Attractor reveals our multiple, shifting selves with power and tenderness, as if Simpson were showing us how to shed our skins.”

Share this:

On a late summer day along the shores of Nova Scotia, a young woman makes a mistake that will claim her life, while at the other end of the beach her brother, Damian, is unaware that she is drowning. Beginning with this shattering event, Anne Simpson’s mesmerizing novel unfolds in unexpected ways.

A year after the accident, Damian and his mother, Ingrid, travel to Niagara Falls to scatter Lisa’s ashes and to visit Ingrid’s estranged brother, once a famous daredevil of the Falls, now blind, and his mentally disabled son. But old wounds and new misunderstandings soon collide. Damian, burdened by guilt, finds solace in an intense relationship with a girl he first glimpses in a tattoo parlour. A runaway with dreams of New York City, Jasmine has her own reasons for wanting to escape the past. Meanwhile, Ingrid, having reluctantly returned to her childhood home, finds herself at odds with her brother and besieged by memories. As the summer progresses, each of them becomes caught in the pull of the past — until an act of recklessness shocks them into a new course for the future.

In startling, luminous language, Anne Simpson captures both the natural beauty and tawdry eccentricity of Niagara Falls, while evoking the elemental bonds that tie us to the ones we love. By turns uncompromising and heartbreakingly tender, Falling is a riveting story of ordinary people poised on the knife-edge of grief and hope.
With this, her second novel, Anne Simpson proves herself to be one of our most striking and original writers.

Share this:

A cell is a world within a world within a world. In this remarkable new collection, Anne Simpson finds form and inspiration in the cell – as it divides and multiplies, expanding beyond its borders.

As these poems journey from the creation of the world emerging out of chaos to the slow unravelling of a life that is revealed in a poem that twists like a double helix, Simpson illuminates what it means to be alive, here and now.

Rich with the muscular craft, vibrant imagery, and exquisite musicality for which her poetry is widely acclaimed, this collection sees Simpson continuing to “negotiate an ever-changing path between language and structure” (Vancouver Sun) – with astonishing results.

It is a work of great vision from one of our most compelling poetic voices.

Share this:

In six essays, poet and novelist Anne Simpson traces the paths of her thoughts, from observation to association, through poetry, language and metaphor, otherness and wilderness. Walking the beaches and trails near her home in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Simpson studies the connections between outdoors and inner life.

A hike along a local ridge and the sighting of an owl spurs an examination of birdsong and its kinship with poetry, whose own perch is somewhere near the edge of grammar, beyond sure knowledge, where resonance and insight take the place of certainty – what Thoreau called “tawny grammar.” Following the owl, Simpson takes us to the underworld, also home to otherness, and to the Spanish concept of duende, the imminent presence of death in life.

In the work of other artists – Matthias Grunewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece, Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry and lesser known visual art, and the fiction of Nabokov, Borges and Dostoevsky – Simpson ponders the location of the other in what is presented as subject. For in this impasse between what readers and viewers and even the subjects themselves see and cannot see resides the death in life, the wilderness on the edge of grammar.

Along the way, Simpson shares some of her own poetic process. The final piece in the collection recounts attempts to write poetry in response to a friend’s photographs. Simpson writes of missteps and her eventual decision to abandon grammar in an effort to move closer to the emptiness that form illuminates and that illuminates form. This consideration of form takes on board the Buddhist teachings found in the Heart Sutra, the commitment and responsibility we have to imagine what we are not. Here then is the other that compels the poet to write, to occupy a place on the outside edge of onself.

“This book is a kind of wild walking,” Simpson says, “because, as I was writing it, my thinking became a little wild, brambly and overgrown – a kind of elderberry bush. The walking and writing became almost indistinguishable. I’d be busy turning something over in my mind – imagining a world without grammar, for instance – while walking in the woods at the Fairmont Ridge, and be startled out of it by the drumming of a ruffed grouse.

In winter, walking across ice, I began thinking that the descents and ascents of poetry were like those of the shamanic journey. And why was poetry so intimately concerned with suffering – did it reveal voyeurism or a depth of care?These essays range around Nova Scotia, as I kept returning to the way this province has become the home of my thinking, not just the place where I live.

The final essay, which seemed to grow out of the marram grass along the barrier beaches of the Northumberland Strait, traces the connection between the Heart Sutra and poetry. I guess the real question, in each of these essays, is the way writing depends upon otherness – and how it arcs toward a relationship with the other.”

Share this:

The human body is a world. How it contains all that it does, how it is altered, and how it is transformed after death are the concerns of Quick, a new collection of poetry from one of Canada’s most exciting poets.

From the shock of a near-fatal car accident to a meditation on the body as one world within other, larger worlds, the book becomes an anatomy in itself.

Share this:

In Loop, Anne Simpson explores the power, and the anguish, of many different modes of return – retrieval, revision, the covering of old ground with eyes wider and thoughts reconditioned by difficult wisdom. These poems occur at that place where a focused, compassionate vision comes to inhabit language and to find the forms that will suffice: a Möbius strip poem that loops back on itself; a crown of sonnets that take us back to the shock and grief of the twin towers and find deep resonance with paintings by Brueghel; a set of quick improvisations like the motion studies done for a drawing class.

Simpson’s work shows us, again and again, the insight and excitement that come from the practice of a necessary craft in the service of a committed vision.

Share this:

A family embarks on their annual pilgrimage to the cottage in Maine. In the course of their journey, a tale will be told, spun from the long absence of the family’s black sheep, and from the prospect of his return. Garnet is the last of Verna and Allister’s four children.

Once a sensitive child, then a difficult adolescent and finally a lost soul, his travails resonate deeply with his family and their own pasts. As their journey brings them closer to their destination, the lives and stories of each character are revealed in turn, gathering together into an intricate web of myth and memory, and of love lost and reclaimed.

Share this:

Sensuously attentive to the world, intensely imagined, and musically driven, Light Falls Through You is a book that remembers the victims – of war, of atrocity, of casual violence – and calls upon language to render homage. Whether she is bringing poetry elegiacally to the service of an individual, to the masses of Rwandan dead or the casualties of the Montreal massacre, Anne Simpson writes with meditative insight balanced by imaginative reach and an intense musicality. In “Usual Devices” she gives an account of the Trojan War in a sequence about punctuation marks, deftly and wittily revealing the entrenchment of epic violence in the ordinary traffic signs of syntax. And the book’s closing poem weaves an altarpiece appropriate to our time out of everyday elements, a homemade icon whose yearning toward coherence, toward closure and hope, is a brave, articulate music for the century’s end. From that place “where we came into it/with our disbelief,” Simpson’s poems point to the imaginative place where “we remember the miraculous.”